


Carry our bodies safe to shore

by Ibbyliv



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Autumn, First Dates, First Kiss, Fluff, Hampstead Heath, London, M/M, Museums, Mutual Pining, Nostalgia, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4845800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ibbyliv/pseuds/Ibbyliv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jehan muses on visiting London, Hampstead Heath and the Keats house with Courfeyrac, and then they kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carry our bodies safe to shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarberryCupcake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarberryCupcake/gifts).



> This is a birthday gift for my beloved StarberryCupcake that is like 2 weeks late, I'm extremely sorry for that but honestly I've been struggling to write you something decent after I returned from my trip that has consumed my mind so yeah. I wrote an exr thing first but it turned out to be sad and it didn't even feel like my writing style so then thankfully I got obsessed with my Courfeyhan babies again and sat down to write something that took a fuckload of time nevertheless and turned out to be nothing but a self-induced, John Keats praising recollection of memories, badly written in second person POV (I know it's tacky and bad but I realized that writing in 2nd person POV is one way to feel more comfortable with my writing and get over with my writer's block, weird I know), that has absolutely no plot or action, no insight of the characters or anything interesting happening. The part with the awesome old lady in the cafe is also self-induced, happened to me and my boyfriend. I'm so sorry about this, please bear with me and I hope you don't completely hate me. Turns out that I couldn't write about anything but the best day of my life so far, which included visiting the Hampstead area, the Heath and John Keats' house which was a lifelong dream. To this day, this must be one of the most poorly written things I've ever published.
> 
> Hope you won't completely hate it, I love you lots and admire everything you do. I wish this year will be an extremely creative and interesting one for you <3 Stay awesome, my friend!

Midair you realize that the characters of your imagination have melted out to watercoloured clouds and there are soft fingertips instead, tracing plans on your skin like feathers. Quite possibly, you think as heavy bricks are lifted off your chest and the pit of your stomach feels empty with the sense of flight, you cease needing to live through paper, borrowed dreams you don’t feel you deserved, when your own life becomes worth writing about.

You travel together on airplanes and trains, falling asleep each other’s shoulder. You ride from Gunnersbury and you feel his head bouncing against you. You don’t dare to hold him, you just hold your breath and he breathes peacefully, drooling warm against your skin, his hair soft and his face peaceful like that of a child, marks on his cheeks from where you just happened to be too bony. You find yourself smiling as the sky changes colors through the dusty windows of the overground, passing platforms and neighborhoods, memorizing the green and rusty taste of the first autumn hues on the tip of your tongue, so that you can kiss it back upon Grantaire’s forehead, and see him painting it, scribbling whispers you don’t even dare to say out loud, ghostly transparent on your wrist. You feel the light caressing his cheeks, stealing him from you, but you’d never dare to claim such freedom anyway.

He gets off the train having just woken up, cranky and adorable, and you’re almost thankful when you start walking because your steps probably overlap with the mindless pounding of your heart against the cage of your ribs, so that you can’t risk giving yourself away, threadbare like the satchel that you use when you try to keep fragments of him, of them, recording their voices in old movie tickets and receipts from some vintage store in Camden, Polaroids and pressed flowers from every place you’ve visited, with one or all of them together.

You lose yourselves in the beautiful streets and you’re so insanely happy you almost don’t loathe the people who actually _live_ here, in those pretty houses with the sunlit attics, along Hampstead Heath and just a breath away from the steps that _he_ took once. You laugh nervously when your hand clasps with Courfeyrac’s, and his thumb rubs your knuckles. “We’re almost there, babe.”

You enter the courtyard of the Keats house repeating verses over and over in your head obsessively, as if you’re going to sit for an exam, or maybe meet him there. Honestly, you need to thank Grantaire for inviting you over in London where he’s working for a major fricking art gallery. Courfeyrac needs to thank Enjolras for the same reason. You need to knit them both a scarf. Or a castle made of wool, or like, marry them and get to live in London forever with Courfeyrac and the lovebirds in their tiny apartment. Because _fuck_ this is big. Two months ago you wouldn’t even have dared to believe that you were going to visit John Keats’s house, not even when Courfeyrac burst into your room and shouted “Lighten up, flower boy! Our fearless leader got a promotion and we got an invitation. Get off your exquisite arse, _on ira à Londres!_ ”

And it’s weird, really, how they happened to invite the two of you specifically. Like, of course Combeferre got to go there a couple of months ago, and an Irish Feuilly doesn’t even need to go to London because like, foster family lives in _Dublin_ which is the city of magic and rainbows and significant human rights, but here you are, you and the boy you’ve danced around to steps you weren’t taught, in the rooms where your favorite British poet lived, fell in love, and wrote.

He’s also the first British poet that happens to make Courfeyrac’s acquaintance, since he’s neither a famous playwright, nor French, Audre Lorde or Richard Siken. Part of the magic of the moment is the exchange of pained and enamored expressions on Courfeyrac’s face as he slowly learns about Keats’s life and work, and falls in love with him like he ought to. You walk through wooden doors and climb up and down creaking stairs with veneration, filling your lungs with the idea of molecules that haven’t died, of universes that haven’t changed themselves and bright stars that aren’t yet extinguished.

You lie back on a carpet in a room with heavy red curtains through which you can see the pale light of the first clouds that weave their way through the sky like silver ribbons. There is a table there for the kids that visit the museum, encouraging you to write a little poem about somebody. You’re is tempted to write about Courfeyrac and laugh it off, but then it feels vile to try and capture his radiant smiles on dead paper and describe the touch that has only burnt your skin in dreams. You write about Enjolras’ grumpy fat cat instead, and Courfeyrac giggles softly and ruffles your hair as if you’re buddies. Which you are, of course. It blooms bitter inside your throat, and you can’t swallow the branches down.

Courfeyrac wears a bonnet and flutters his eyelids and you’d laugh otherwise, but you can’t seem able to focus in anything else but Fanny Brawne’s room. Tears well in your eyes and block your vision and congest your chest, and Courfeyrac’s face falls when he sees you. He joins you on the sofa, bringing a speaker to his ears, and you watch his lips sewing themselves together with melancholy. It almost makes you feel better in a horrible, sadistic way, but then his fingers find your palm and you choke your first sob. He takes you by the hand silently and you move to the Pre-Raphaelite room where you see him drowning in the poems, letting his eyelids slide shut, like falling leaves of autumn, and suddenly you want to kiss every inch of his skin that shared this day with you. “Thank you, Courf,” you murmur, and he presses his lips behind your ear with a smile that makes you tremble.

You want to sail the streets and lie down on the streets and _hug_ the streets, you want to never go back and never think of clocks and watches again, because you feel like _living_ for the first time, and forgetting time is the first step through integrating your body with the space, your fingers wooden like branches and dew, exquisite flowers on your imaginary antlers, growing on the roots of your hair.

You run around and dance with your clothes swirling around you, feeling free against the crashing leaves, holding a hand that doesn’t belong to you. You lie next to him, on your spread coat in Hampstead Heath, on a spot by the lake where the brick houses across the shore are reflected between the first few raindrops that break the clarity. The first droplets are braver than you’ll ever be to touch his skin and make him laugh and be caught on his tongue and between his teeth. You welcome the rain as if you’ve prayed for it, as if it’s cleansing and weaving a truth that’s not the one you’re always obliged to come back to. You doze off smelling the ground, and jolt up with a short lasting dream, something about someone letting the cat out, something about getting to keep her and share your secrets with her, with the spiders and the squirrels. Your mouth tastes clean, of raindrops and groggy coffee. Maybe you were born in these clothes, in this ugly warm sweater, sheltered and comfortable. Maybe you’re not meant for verse, just for green lakes and owl songs, for ghostlike subway maps that match your veins.

You start to write about dragons and fairies and chalk, about old gothic novels and the day that you might wake up and feel brave. You write about humid summers and their skeletons, about some attic that you dreamt of, full with old books and touching each other’s face. The rain gradually ceases and you watch the airplanes trace their cotton threads over the tiny patches of blue in the sky, carrying memories and dreams away from markets, neighborhoods and parks, dark alleys and lakes of glass. Your chest tightens.

“Can we stay here forever?”

“Mhmm…” Courfeyrac turns his head and faces you, his dimples dug with a smile. “You know that incredibly narrow-minded, sexist thing they say about a great woman being behind every great man, right?”

You cringe. “What about it?”

“Well, seems more suitable to say that behind every great poet, there certainly is a _swell_ gardener.”

You can do nothing but whole-heartedly agree.                

When the sky smokes itself charcoal again and opens up, you seek shelter in a tiny café with old pictures on the walls and olive green wooden tables. It reminds you of a picturesque little place your parents had taken you to after a visit in Versailles, before puberty came and violently carried away your naïve romanticization of royalty built through movies and your love for puffy wigs and Baroque kitsch. This place smells so good and Courf looks quite proud about his discovery. He takes off his navy pea coat and hangs it on his chair. You can’t help but think of his neck as he unwraps his scarf and exposes it, of how dry your mouth feels and of how your lips would feel pressed on that spot _there_ , where you’d be able to taste his pulse.

He catches your expression unabashed, radiant green eyes glinting mysteriously. He cracks a smile, quirks an eyebrow. Your fingers ache to trace the small wrinkles on the corners of his lips, and your lungs feel rough, stuffed with a heavy scent of paper and smoke and of the wild carnations that he gives away.

“Too emotional, flower?” he asks teasingly, tracing his thumb over the tattoo of blooming antlers on your wrist.

“You bet your ass I am,” you raise an eyebrow flicking your fingers back against the bridge of his hand with a smirk.

Your relationship is obnoxious and threadbare and everyone sees through it but you. What you get to see is Montparnasse bringing you pretty books and flowers and sexy lingerie without their tags and the faint reminiscence of a guilt you no longer have when you wear them, and Courfeyrac stumbling back to Enjolras and Grantaire’s apartment with two pretty boys, some girl’s moans through the paperthin walls of the apartment he shares with Combeferre back in Paris. You wonder if you’ll ever feel at home again, after you wake up from this, after you forget how to share and how to pretend you’ve got it together and neat like a super market list and a scheduled appointment to have your hair chopped off like it’s going to grow out overnight.

The thing is, you can’t bear what’s gonna happen next, Enjolras’ inability to understand how you can feel at home somewhere that just happens not to be Paris for once, people back in France reducing what you wish you could lock safely between your ribs to _just a trip,_ and step on it and mess with your mind, and then it’s going to be just sentences scribed on a piece of paper, _we smoked through the sunset in St. James park_ , _we collected leaves in a graveyard_ _and made a poster for Grantaire_ , _we had milkshakes in a diner and crepes in the morning light_ , _played the Beach Boys in a jukebox and Dance Dance Revolution in an arcade_. _We tried to watch the dust dance in the afternoon and the stars behind the consuming lights of City, we had our breath taken away in Lion King and held each other as we caught it, we visited bookshops and vinyl shops and tattoo parlors pretending they were haunted houses and, somewhere around 5am, we returned home with our fingers laced together._

A gorgeous old lady comes to take the order. She smiles at you and asks you about your visit. “Have you been to the fair?”

"What, there was a fair?” Courfeyrac pouts like a child who hasn’t been allowed to taste all the ice cream in the shop. “No, it was the first time we visited this place, and we’re kind of in love…” he explains merrily. The lady’s knowing grin almost makes you heart forget how to beat. “I mean – ” he rushes to explain with what tastes like horror and the denial you’ve been fighting with all along, “with _the place_! The Heath is really pretty, and all!”

“Aw,” the old lady’s face falls but there’s a glimmer of mischief in her gaze. “Because I’d almost hoped you were in love with each other!”

What’s even more precious of him is that he doesn’t avoid your gaze, only his previous smirk mellows down as if there’s a secret he’s stolen and swallowed. He orders a carrot soup and hot chocolate, and after that spends a good deal of time focused on his bread and butter. You can’t get a bite down and your throat is blocked with the thrumming bump of your heart.

The heavy rain on their way back to the train is a horrible cliché and you’re made of those. It fills the silence and gives you space you never asked for, even though your shoulders brush together as you walk.

You’re both on your way to the platform, or you think you are, when you’re dragged out of your thoughts and into a small bookshop. You take the opportunity to hide behind the wooden shelves, inhale deeply and muse on thoughts of flight, but you keep landing onto each other and mumble thoughtless nothings, until he touches your shoulder from behind and offers you a book opened somewhere in the middle where he points with his finger.

_Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane_

_In some untrodden region of my mind,_

_Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,_

_Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:_

_Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees_

_Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;_

_And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,_

_The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;_

_And in the midst of this wide quietness_

_A rosy sanctuary will I dress_

_With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,_

_With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,_

_With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,_

_Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:_

_And there shall be for thee all soft delight_

_That shadowy thought can win,_

_A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,_

_To let the warm Love in!_

You close the distance between you and he cups your cheek with one hand, throwing his arm around your waist and pulling you close as if you’re about to waltz. Your lips touch his, soft like feathers in the beginning, exploratory and disbelieving, then parting and warm with need. He presses against and you throw your fingers through his hair, feeling the warmth of his mouth, emitting a sigh. Your foreheads touch last, it’s an affirmation to a question you now remember asking. You feel the curve of his lips against your own and your cheeks hurt with smiling.

“Let’s take this out in the rain, what’d you think?” he hums on your skin and your insides flutter with fervent excitement.

“I think you're full of sap and none of you people is _ever_ allowed to call _me_ a romantic with a little r ever again,” you barely even hear yourself chuckle like you had just figured out how.

To that he nods, and lets you lead the way into the rain.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem that Courfeyrac finds is a part from John Keats's 'Ode to Psyche'.


End file.
